Say Cheese
One of the neatest things about working on a product that delivers the whole planet is seeing how our users explore it.
Simflight.com runs a monthly screenshot competition with varying themes, that show some of that off.
I think few people realize that what we do is very special indeed. There are some games out there with great graphics and beautiful environments. The thing is, it's stagecraft. Very very very well done stagecraft. The lighting is for the most part pre-rendered, you can't roam freely thoughout the whole world. You're basically limited to a set area--- a track, like in Forza (also very pretty).
We go a little further.
If you were to leave FS running 24 hours a day for a year, you'd see the sun track across the sky, the light change, shadows on the mountains creep across the landscape, real world weather appropriate to your location sweep across the sky, the sun set, the moon rise, and the leaves on trees (and the grass on the ground) change with the seasons. You could set an aircraft on autopilot with unlimited fuel, and all that'd happen while the landscape rolled beneath you.
Except at the poles. We don't handle the North or South Pole very well (at all). Everywhere else though.
Sure, some of what we do is generic. It has to be. The planet's pretty big. But we do try and build as much randomness into our systems as possible, or at least make such systems extendable. A good example of that being our weather system. We implemented a set of 10 skys, with differing lighting values, so days would look different. Sometimes it's subtle, sometimes a little more dramatic (like sunsets).We introduced a brand new volumetric cloud system that has built in randomness at runtime so the 3D clouds looked a bit different everytime you see 'em.
As much as we do though, our users will go further. It says we've done our job right when you see stuff like this.
If you check out the link above, or something like this, or this, or this, you'll see a lot of third party after market products (aircraft and scenery). Good stuff.
Of course having said all that about how I think we do a great job with our generic stuff, I'll be the first to admit this looks phenomenal. We do much more limited areas of aerial imagery for various parts of the world but it'd be great to do the whole shebang that way...
Maybe someday.
